From his picnic table office across the street from the airport, Jerry can spot the tourists who have arrived in Culebra with mistaken ideas about this tiny Caribbean island.

"The travel magazines may have done us an injustice," said Jerry, who operates Jerry's Jeeps rentals.

"When I see people walking out of the airport with golf clubs, I know they've come to the wrong place."

Culebra, you see, has no golf courses - or fancy resorts, or shopping strips, or McDonald's - which is fine with most of its more than 2,000 residents.

A longtime secret in the shadow of Puerto Rico, Culebra's beaches and reefs recently won praise on the Travel Channel, and both Conde Nast Traveler and National Geographic Traveler gave Culebra cover treatment in their spring issues.

Culebra (koo-LAY-bruh) is part of the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, situated a 30-minute puddle-jumper flight east of San Juan. Culebra and its sister, Vieques (vee-ay-kays), are known as the Spanish Virgin Islands. Culebra is Spanish for "snake," although the few found on the island are harmless and seldom seen.

Like Vieques, Culebra once was used for target practice by American destroyers and jet fighters. But the Culebrans revolted, and in 1975 a court halted the bombardment.

Visitors can find evidence of the military past. Two rusted tanks that were used as targets sit mired in the sand of Playa Flamenco, and the concrete formations of shark pens where the Navy did repellent research jut into the surf. Coral-encrusted projectiles lie on the reef on the other side of the island. The week before my visit, the Army Corps of Engineers was making another sweep, looking for old ordnance.

"They were exploding 500- and 1,000-pound bombs out there," said Jerry, the businessman across the street from Culebra's small airfield. "You could hear them from all over the island - whoom, whoom."

Jerry formerly lived in the St. Louis area but asked that his last name not be mentioned. Like many of the 200 or so Americans who have found refuge in Culebra, he left behind some bad memories.

As Pat Megnin, an Alabamian running the hotel where I stayed, put it: "We don't consider ourselves expatriates, because this is still part of the United States. We're more like dropouts."

Many of those dropouts wonder whether Culebra's burst of publicity will bring some travelers not quite prepared for this laid-back island, which up to now has been visited mostly by the yachting crowd.

Tourists who expect Cancun or the Bahamas will find the amenities wanting. We were faced with something of a dilemma when the staff of the Dinghy Dock, easily the best of the island's handful of restaurants, took off at midweek for some R&R. (A footnote: They have corrected the sign, which originally said Dingy Dock.)

Culebra lacks the rain forests and waterfalls of, say, Jamaica or Dominica. Its low-lying hills are covered largely by cactus and acacia, a thorny invader from Africa. Dewey, named after the American admiral, is the only town, and you can walk its skinny streets with six stop signs in half an hour. By vehicle, the entire 3-mile-by-7-mile island can be explored in half a day.

Chickens outnumber cars on the three roads, each of which leads to a beach. The only traffic jams come when the ferry from Puerto Rico lands at the municipal pier. The people live in modest homes, many painted in bright island colors. Visitors stay at "guest houses," which offer rudimentary accommodations.

What Culebra does have, in abundance, are beaches of white sand and aquamarine waters. Often, yours will be the first footprints of the day. The reefs are some of the healthiest in the Caribbean, with giant brain, elkhorn and fan corals teeming with flamboyantly colored fish.

Bring a book - relaxing is a way of life. A traveling companion, who was making his sixth visit, is fond of saying: "I'm a Type A personality. After a couple days in Culebra, I'm down to a low C."

Its history as a target limited development on the island. Because there are no water or power plants, an underwater pipeline brings those necessities from Vieques. When the U.S. military left, nearly 2,000 of the island's 7,700 acres reverted from bombing range to the Culebra Wildlife Refuge, which is administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Puerto Rico Department of Natural Resources.

Most tourists who go to Culebra are birders and beach bums, sailors and surfers, snorkelers and scuba

divers. There is no industry or large-scale farming to pollute the waters. No high-rises line the island's wild beaches, such as Brava, where not a single light obscured the blinding display of stars on a moonless night.

Which leads to my biggest frustration during our visit. The solitude of Brava invites a yearly migration of leatherback sea turtles, which crawl onto the beaches by the hundreds to lay eggs on spring nights. At up to 1,600 pounds, these Volkswagen-size living dinosaurs are the largest reptiles left on earth.

We arrived during the peak of the migration. Coralations, a local conservation group, is helping the Department of Natural Resources collect data on the egg-laying, a federal project that began two decades ago. I volunteered with the group for an all-night beach patrol.

Our job would be to measure the behemoths and count their eggs. The giant turtles shed tears as their eggs drop, and the islanders say they are crying because they will never see their babies.

From 7 p.m. to 5 a.m., our six-member patrol stalked the sands of Brava without benefit of flashlights, which might disorient turtles that use the constellations as their compasses on their long voyage from the North Atlantic.

We saw turtle tracks left behind on the beach from the previous night, as if a convoy of pickup trucks had pulled in from the sea. But on my patrol, the turtles took the night off.

A whim of nature, I said, hiding my disappointment.

The night was not a total loss. Lying on the beach in the darkness between patrols, we saw the lights of St. Thomas in the distance and marveled at what we thought was a string of bright stars climbing nearly straight up from the horizon. Later, I learned it was an alignment of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn that last occurred in February 1940.

The pilot of the six-passenger plane taking us 17 miles to Culebra asked before taking off from San Juan: "Have you been to Culebra before?" My two companions, who had been there several times, said the pilot was not being sociable, but merely preparing us for the novel arrival.

After a short flight over an island-studded sea, the pilot made a run over the Culebra airport to check the winds. He then dropped between two scrub-covered hills, veered sharply to the left, dipped in a crosswind, straightened the wings and careened to a stop on the abbreviated runway. I was ready for the Happy Landing bar, situated conveniently at the end of the tarmac.

The bar, by the way, received worldwide exposure several years ago when a wire-service photo showed a small plane tossed by a hurricane onto its roof, just above the Happy Landing sign.

Jerry's Jeeps rented us a vintage Isuzu Trooper, and a 10-minute drive ended at Zoni Beach, where the water changed colors as it stretched into the sea. "It's like Scope in the shallows, then turns to Windex," said my friend.

We rented a one-bedroom apartment at the Posada la Hamaca for $85 a night, with a third bed in the kitchen area.

The room opened onto a patio, which overlooked the canal that splits the island in two, providing a shortcut for small boats. Next door was Mamacita's, the town's lone hot spot, where Puerto Ricans visiting from the big island partied late and loud.

Locals said the island is swarmed by young Puerto Ricans during spring breaks, and they are greeted by drug-sniffing dogs at the airport.

That afternoon, a few groups of people were at Playa Flamenco, so we took a short hike over the hill to the other side of the peninsula and Carlos Rosario Beach, which was deserted.

Although also known as Impact Beach because of the shells that once landed there, Carlos Rosario offers perhaps the island's top snorkeling.

With plenty of shoreline shade trees to relax under in between swims, we had a Caribbean paradise to ourselves.

A Civil War-period coat worn by a nurse — a woman from a prominent Mathews County family who some believe was the only woman to be commissioned as a captain in the Confederate Army — is among the nominees for Virginia's Top 10 Endangered Artifacts program.

NAVAL STATION NORFOLK — The Navy on Saturday commissioned the USS John Warner, adding a 12th Virginia-class submarine to the fleet and celebrating the legacy of its namesake, the retired senator who was hailed as a statesman.